15 September 2014

The Great Unraveling

It was the time of unraveling. Long afterward, in the ruins, people asked: How could it happen?

By Roger Cohen

It
was a time of beheadings.With a left-handed sawing motion, against a
desert backdrop, in bright sunlight, a Muslim with a British accent cut
off the heads of two American journalists and a British aid worker.
The jihadi seemed comfortable in his work, unhurried. His victims were
broken. Terror is theater. Burning skyscrapers, severed heads: The
terrorist takes movie images of unbearable lightness and gives them
weight enough to embed themselves in the psyche.

It
was a time of aggression.The leader of the largest nation on earth
pronounced his country encircled, even humiliated. He annexed part of a
neighboring country, the first such act in Europe since 1945, and
stirred up a war on further land he coveted. His surrogates shot down a civilian passenger plane. The victims, many of them Europeans, were
left to rot in the sun for days. He denied any part in the violence,
like a puppeteer denying that his puppets’ movements have any connection
to his. He invoked the law the better to trample on it. He invoked
history the better to turn it into farce. He reminded humankind that the
idiom fascism knows best is untruth so grotesque it begets unreason.

It was a time of breakup. The most successful union in history, forged on an island in the North Sea in 1707, headed toward possible dissolution — not because it had failed (refugees from across the seas still
clamored to get into it), nor even because of new hatreds between its
peoples. The northernmost citizens were bored. They were disgruntled.
They were irked, in some insidious way, by the south and its moneyed
capital, an emblem to them of globalization and inequality. They
imagined they had to control their National Health Service in order to
save it even though they already controlled it through devolution and
might well have less money for its preservation (not that it was
threatened in the first place) as an independent state. The fact that
the currency, the debt, the revenue, the defense, the solvency and the
European Union membership of such a newborn state were all in doubt did
not appear to weigh much on a decision driven by emotion, by urges, by a
longing to be heard in the modern cacophony — and to heck with the day
after. If all else failed, oil would come to the rescue (unless somebody
else owned it or it just ran out).

It
was a time of weakness. The most powerful nation on earth was tired of
far-flung wars, its will and treasury depleted by absence of victory. An
ungrateful world could damn well police itself. The nation had bridges
to build and education systems to fix. Civil wars between Arabs could
fester. Enemies might even kill other enemies, a low-cost gain. Middle
Eastern borders could fade; they were artificial colonial lines on a
map. Shiite could battle Sunni, and Sunni Shiite, there was no stopping
them. Like Europe’s decades-long religious wars, these wars had to run
their course. The nation’s leader mockingly derided his own “wan, diffident, professorial”
approach to the world, implying he was none of these things, even if he
gave that appearance. He set objectives for which he had no plan. He
made commitments he did not keep. In the way of the world these things
were noticed. Enemies probed. Allies were neglected, until they were
needed to face the decapitators who talked of a Caliphate and called
themselves a state. Words like “strength” and “resolve” returned to the
leader’s vocabulary. But the world was already adrift, unmoored by the
retreat of its ordering power. The rule book had been ripped up.

It
was a time of hatred. Anti-Semitic slogans were heard in the land that
invented industrialized mass murder for Europe’s Jews. Frightened
European Jews removed mezuzahs from their homes. Europe’s Muslims felt
the ugly backlash from the depravity of the decapitators, who were adept
at Facebooking their message. The fabric of society frayed. Democracy
looked quaint or outmoded beside new authoritarianisms. Politicians,
haunted by their incapacity, played on the fears of their populations,
who were device-distracted or under device-driven stress. Dystopia was a
vogue word, like utopia in the 20th century. The great rising nations
of vast populations held the fate of the world in their hands but hardly
seemed to care.

It was a time of fever. People in West Africa bled from the eyes.

It
was a time of disorientation. Nobody connected the dots or read Kipling
on life’s few certainties: “The Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow
returns to her Mire / And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling
back to the Fire.”

Until it was too late and people could see the Great Unraveling for what it was and what it had wrought.